The Rich Roll Podcast – Yuval Noah Harari on Why Clarity is Power

Key Takeaways

There are positives – Netflix gives us movie recommendations, and Amazon tells us what to buy, but soon we’ll be asking Google who to date, what to study in school, and which career to pursue

And there are potential negatives – What happens when a big data algorithm can not only predict people’s feelings, but also knows a person better than his or her feelings indicate?

If this system can predict and understand your feelings so well, it will probably be able to manipulate your feelings

“The job market landscape ahead of us, will be fairly hectic. The automation revolution will not be one single watershed event. Every 10 years you are likely to lose your job, or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of machine learning wizardry. If you want to stay in the game, you will have to reinvent yourself, and not just once, but repeatedly.”

Our education system is very outdated – We need to invest more in learning how to learn, emotional intelligence, and mental flexibility

However, we just don’t yet have a scalable model yet for how to teach these thing

Climate change can only be solved with global cooperation

“The most important thing about meditation– being able to see reality as it is, to tell the difference between what is really happening, and what are just stories generated by the mind”

The highest ideal of education, according to humanism, is to teach people to think for themselves

All this is now threatened – what happens when a big data algorithm can not only predict people’s feelings, but also knows a person better than his or her feelings indicate?

If this system can predict and understand your feelings so well, it will probably be able to manipulate your feelings

It will be able to change whether or not you like or dislike something

What will be the effects of this?

The theme of irrelevance

“The robots are coming, they’ll take all the jobs, we’ll have nothing to do” – the simplistic way to think about this

The places that are automated first (like Bangledesh, Honduras, or Brazil) will get the worst of it – the places where it’s easy to automate what they do

New jobs will appear though (at least in certain areas)

People who write code will become more needed, also well as people who deal with all the data being collected

But soon, these jobs too will be automated and change very rapidly

“The job market landscape ahead of us, will be fairly hectic. The automation revolution will not be one single watershed event. Every 10 years you are likely to lose your job, or your job is going to be completely transformed by the new wave of machine learning wizardry. If you want to stay in the game, you will have to reinvent yourself, and not just once, but repeatedly.”

This is even more important as people live longer

As you get older, it will become more and more difficult to “reinvent yourself”

We don’t know what human life will look like, when more and more of the decisions are made by the algorithms on our behalf

We’ll no longer be making the big decisions (who to marry, what to study, who to date, what career to pursue), the algorithms will

“What will life look like, when whenever you come to a big decision, you just take out your smartphone and just say ‘OK Google, what should I do here?’“

In more and more fields, we’re discovering it’s a good idea to listen to Google, Netflix, or Amazon (Google directs you, Netflix tells you what to watch, Amazon tells you what to order)

It’s this now, but in 20 years we’ll be asking the algorithms what to study, who to marry etc.

Free Will

“People definitely have a will to make choices, but these decisions don’t reflect freedom. They reflect a million different factors that we are unaware of.”

“If you believe in free will, you are extremely uncurious about the way you make decisions, about your own desires, and about your own mind. You just identify with what pops into your mind.”

The Education System

Our education system is so out of step with the time, especially as mentioned above, people will need to reinvent their skills more and more as years go on

“We don’t have an alternative model yet, at least none that are scalable”

We need to invest more in learning how to learn, emotional intelligence, and mental flexibility …..but how do you teach these things?

Why aren’t we talking about all of this?

“It’s always difficult to deal with future problems when you have more urgent business”